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Women face unique and disproportionate negative impacts from corporate misconduct. Women also face unique barriers to accessing remedy for corporate harms. Businesses have a responsibility to address these gendered impacts, including through undertaking due diligence with a “gender lens.” Additionally, grievance mechanisms and their staff must adopt procedures to mitigate the barriers women face in securing remedy. The 2018 OECD Due Diligence Guidance, and this OECD Watch submission, offer suggestions to businesses and grievance mechanisms to help them undertake gendered due diligence and better enable women’s access to remedy.

Over the past nine years, OECD Watch and its members have participated in the National Contact Point (NCP) Peer Review Process, which seeks to encourage improvement of individual NCPs as well as functional equivalence between all NCPs. The peer review initiative has great potential to strengthen the NCP grievance mechanism. Unfortunately, OECD Watch continues to observe serious gaps and shortcomings in the process and review template itself that hinder achievement of meaningful improvements and greater functional equivalence. As a result of this fact, many civil society members have lost confidence in the process. This loss of confidence is driving civil society away from seeing NCPs as an effective body for encouraging responsible business conduct, jeopardizing the legitimacy and effectiveness of the OECD Guidelines as a whole.

In November 2017, OECD Watch filed the first-ever substantiated submission to the OECD Investment Committee (IC) addressing the Australian government’s application, through its National Contact Point, of the OECD Guidelines’ Procedural Guidance to a particular specific instance. In the intervening months, OECD Watch has engaged in the review process undertaken by the Investment Committee and its Working Party on Responsible Business Conduct (WPRBC). While we appreciate the rigor with which the review has been undertaken, we are concerned by several shortcomings with the review procedures. To resolve these shortcomings and ensure an equitable, transparent, and predictable process in future, this statement proposes that the IC implement several reforms to the substantiated submission procedures.

This submission responds to questions posed by the Australian NCP regarding proposed improvement to its specific instance procedures. The submission outlines ways in which the NCP can strengthen its procedures to advance the effectiveness of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and better resolve complaints related to corporate misconduct.